@dpknauss
Profile
Registered: 17 years, 9 months ago
I am a Solution Architect for Multidots, an enterprise WordPress agency, and I have been using WordPress since its beginning. I have always taken great joy in planning, designing, building, and sustaining open-source tools that people love to use, help them do great work, and are simple to maintain. Previously, I worked as a technical generalist for Liquid Web's StellarWP family of brands, weaving between marketing, product development, and design teams, writing, editing, and QA in each area. I mostly focused on SolidWP, Solid Security, and Infosec topics. From 2016 to 2023, I was the editor of Post Status, a wonderful part of the WordPress community for people making a living with WordPress and learning together. There, I learned, wrote, and did podcasts on the business and culture of WordPress. I started freelancing as a web designer in the late 90s. I moved into the emerging open-source web app space to take on clients who wanted to publish, sell products and services, build communities, and/or market themselves online. My first client was a medical research and teaching institution that needed me to scope out a Magento eCommerce project, write an RFP for it, and shop it out to preferred vendors, one of which has since become a major WordPress enterprise agency, and today I have colleagues there I've met at WordCamps. In retrospect, this was a great early experience that forced me to learn about relevant laws (contracts, liability, data and personal information privacy, HIPAA, PCI) from the start. It's been wonderful to see the industry and WordPress ecosystem grow over this period. Consulting and building sites for clients was my main focus from roughly 2004 to 2014, which allowed me to work at home and be a full-time parent active in my local community. By the end of that period, I was doing WordPress projects almost exclusively after working with many others — Movable Type, Drupal, Mambo, Joomla, Textpattern, and a number of eCommerce systems. I continue to operate a consultancy, New Local Media, but my work focus has shifted to solution architecture for Multidots and giving back to the WordPress community, now as a sponsored contributor. Since the '00s, I've moved from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to rural Iowa and now Edmonton, Alberta. I'm originally from upstate New York, but I've also lived in New Jersey, North Carolina, and Micronesia. I'm an organizer for the Edmonton WordPress Meetup and WordCamp Canada. I blog about living with (and medical research related to) Charcot Marie Tooth (CMT) and other neuromuscular diseases at https://cmt.blog. I'm proud to have had this account since 2007 and being involved with WordPress so long, but I also had an older one right from the beginning, much like I did on Wikipedia. I still kick myself for losing control of them!
Website: http://dan.knauss.ca
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